


The First Plague Dragon

by amberite



Category: Flight Rising
Genre: Body Horror, Dragons, Eggpreg, Gen, Gleefully gross things, Isn't biology fun, Parasites, emetophobia warning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-11
Updated: 2013-08-11
Packaged: 2017-12-23 02:48:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 446
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/921104
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amberite/pseuds/amberite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A self-indulgent little thing I wrote up for an askblog fic challenge. </p><p>
  <em>She has absorbed the sickness of the world into herself, and sickness, too, is life.</em>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	The First Plague Dragon

**Author's Note:**

> First work in this fandom! At least that's what AO3 is telling me. Mind the warnings.

The Plaguemother's stomach roils and she knows she is ready.

She has absorbed the sickness of the world into herself, and sickness, too, is life. Uncountable numbers of bacteria and viruses and fungal particles and squirming parasites, like a jungle of riotous growth inside her, breeding and exchanging data and mutating and _becoming_. All of nature that the Gladekeeper would reject, she has accepted.

With her magics she has guided that life into the semblance of flesh, but it is not all of a piece, it is not a unity, it is diverse and chaotic, and she glories in it. She rose from the wastes, abomination and perfect, and clothed the naked sharpness of her bones in colonies of microorganisms, and the sludge that is waste from some of them nourishes the others. It is not peaceful, but it is an equilibrium, and she will never be alone.

And now, rising up in her with all this life, comes the desire to make something more.

She has eaten her fill of the wastes of the earth and it churns in her stomach. The makeshift scrapwork of parasites she calls her body rebels, begs for a purging to restore the balance. She growls with an earthquake rumble and shudders, and noxious fluids drip from her sides, and she crouches down on her haunches as something rises in her throat. It's enormous and choking, and she gags.

She feels the life in it, enclosed in. Something like a heartbeat. Something new. Order arising from chaos.

The Plaguemother shakes and heaves and the thing in her throat slides out, hot and slightly soft-edged, encased in slime. She holds it gently in her jaw before dipping her ghastly head, letting the egg drop to the ground. Worms crawl along the sides of the egg-casing and she strokes the surface of it with the back of one long claw, admiring.

Exhausted, she settles to the ground with one skeletal wing braced over it, guarding the growing thing inside.

Yes. This will be...

A companion, an accomplice. The first dragon she can call her own. A champion of contagion, infected from hatching with the teeming flood of life that feeds on the destruction of other life.

She is amazed by its perfection, amazed by how in every bone and sinew and heartbeat its life flows in harmony with destruction, infectious and exquisite and _hers_ , and when the Plaguemother shuts her eyes, she dreams of her children multiplying. Worming their way into other clans and corrupting them; building nests fertile with decay; spreading the pathogenic life in their veins across the face of the world. And her jagged teeth smile into the darkness.


End file.
